The idea of friendship can be so simple and yet so complicated from time to time; I used to think I had hundreds of friends, when in reality there were/are very few who know anything about me. Alas, the idea of friendship is so... how do you say it, "Interesting".
The year was 2004 and I was struggling to capture a sense of identity, a sense of balance within my life. I was twenty seven years of age and on the cusp of purchasing a new home, losing my job (unknownd to me), and starting a journey which still hasn't truly ended.
Due to an overdue breakup, I found myself lost, not just a little lost but plenty lost; I wasn't taking care of myself emotionally or physically yet only a few were able to detect my "struggle". It's in these moments, you can decipher who cares and who doesn't, I could have done the inevitable and ended my life and my "friends" would have said, "We never knew he was hurting, we wish he had come to us and said something." Perhaps we all do this with people we truly don't care about, it's always easier to see the dust after it settles then when it's in the air (ooooh, I like that, I think I'll add it to my cache)
In the summer of 2004, my friend Nick and his family were planning a trip to New York City to see the sites and sounds of the Big Apple. As we sat around their kitchen table, one afternoon, his mother quipped about how she had just found tickets from Ontario, CA to New York for under $300 RT, within moments there were five tickets punched and I was the one being adopted. To this day, I'm still unsure why they allowed me to tag along but I think it has something to do with the word friendship.
Even as I look at this picture, today, I can only focus on the skeleton of a person I was, for so long; I was emotionally drained and frail but very few were able to pick up on any of this. It's amazing what pictures do, they capture moments whether good or bad. The sun was shining on us that evening as we left and it's still shining on us, today.
I was going to write a super deep and emotional post but all anyone needs to know is, that this trip to New York changed me, it gave me a week of distractions and new perspectives on who I was and who I could be. During the week we were there, I fell in love with Che Guevara, we visited Broadway and saw The Producers, observed Ground Zero in all of it's quietness, walked by the Today Show, at by Rockefeller Center, visited NYU, Little Italy, peeped a comedy show, ate hot dogs from street vendors, walked Wall St, and we laughed, we laughed a lot.
The best therapy in life is true friendship and the best reward is being a true friend. Over the course of the last thirteen years, we've gone to weddings, football games, movies, family gatherings, funerals, hospital rooms, and a delivery room or two all in the name of... you guessed it, friendship.
In 2004, I was broken, almost to the point of no return, unbeknownst to so many, but there was this family who took me in under their collective wings and they helped me explore a new environment and in the process they helped me discover a bit of what was missing in my life.
As I sit here, I'm happy to say that, "A picture or pictures can be worth however many words you want to use to describe it."